· Somewhere on American cable television, the landmark 1964 BBC series The Great War is always on, said TV producer Taylor Downing at Wednesday's launch of David Cannadine's new book History and the Media, in a packed London Review Bookshop. Tristram Hunt was keen to distinguish history (The Death of Yugoslavia) from heritage (Time Team). Melvyn Bragg dismissed suggestions that the small screen was not the place for learned discussions. "We are charlatans, our standards our appalling," chipped in producer Martin Smith from the floor. Downing recalled the good old days of great men lecturing on the telly - "of course it was always men".

A voice piped up: "We have Schamas, Starkeys, Fergusons, Hunts: why are you all chaps?" It was historian Linda Colley, who wondered whether it was commissioning editors or viewers who prefer the past to have a deep voice. Bragg suggested women prefer drama, and as if to prove his point: Cate Blanchett stares out from the cover of Cannadine's book, dressed up as Elizabeth I.

· Summer is a busy time for pilgrims, and literary shrines rely on a seasonal upturn in attendances. But a row has blown up about one writer's hideaway that has yet to be reborn as a museum. Ernest Hemingway's former homes in Florida, Cuba, and Oak Park, Illinois are already open to the public, but the building Papa died in on July 2 1961 remains closed. The Nature Conservancy of Idaho, which owns the house in the woods in Ketchum, has tried to schedule visits, but wealthy residents close to the Sun Valley ski resort complained. Hemingway's relatives have mixed feelings about the project. As the writer's son Patrick put it: "Do you think you could like the place where your dad killed himself?"

· Fathers and sons have offered up case studies to literary critics ever since TS Eliot diagnosed Hamlet's Oedipus complex. Before he vowed never to write another hostile review Dale Peck published What We Lost: A Story of My Father's Childhood, which suggested a strong, sympathetic identification by the American writer with his parent.

In Hatchet Jobs, a new collection of Peck's famously savage reviews, critics discovered some different symptoms: in the New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn noted that "dynamics of power, punishment and pain between a younger and an older man have recurred in Peck's work from the beginning", and in the New York Times John Leonard wrote: "Peck is so hard on his elders that you suspect him of symbolic patricide, except that he is just as hard on his peers." Leonard offered would-be reviewers some easy-to-follow rules: "First... do no harm. Second, never stoop to score a point or bite an ankle. Third, always understand that in this symbiosis, you are the parasite." SR